Monthly Archives: October 2013

Charles Cook writes in National Review Online The Single-Payer Fantasy. Excerpt: Reassuring as this tale might be to those who are worriedly surveying the damage that Healthcare.gov has wrought upon their project, it remains self-evidently absurd. Obamacare was passed into…

Daniel Greenfield writes in his excellent blog Sultan Knish, Government is Magic. Excerpts: Our technocracy is detached from competence. It’s not the technocracy of engineers, but of “thinkers” who read Malcolm Gladwell and Thomas Friedman and watch TED talks and…

From the Washington Post, Robert Samuelson writes The Greenspan Paradox. Excerpts: But there was an unrecognized downside: With a less-risky economy, people — homeowners, bankers, investment managers — concluded they could do things once considered more risky. Consumers could borrow…

From The Weekly Standard, Killing Obamacare by Jay Cost: It was the success of the progressives in World War I that inspired Franklin Roosevelt—Wilson’s assistant secretary of the Navy—to treat the Great Depression as a national emergency akin to the…

Political projects by definition exist to mandate outcomes that are different than those that people would choose for themselves if left to their own devices. It was for this reason that the economist Murray Rothbard famously argued that political action…

Kevin Williams in National Review, A Shocking Number: Fifty years into the Democrats’ declaration of a war on poverty and President Kennedy’s first executive order for affirmative action, while spending $300 million a year onworthless diversity workshops and singing endless verses…

Comments on the disastrous health care roll out. Delaying from Behind by James Taranto at the WSJ Our younger readers–those who were born yesterday–may not remember when delaying ObamaCare was considered a wild idea, its exponents limited to crazy right-wing terrorists. Times have…

From National Review Online, Jeremy Carl writes Liberal Denial on Climate Change and Energy. Excerpts: Taken as a whole, the Golden State poll suggests that many liberals have a deeply ideological view of energy and climate and policy, one in…

Michael Novak writes in The National Review, Democratic Capitalism The prospering of free societies depends on certain moral and cultural practices. Sept 24, 2013 Excerpt: For instance, more than a hundred nations of the world have discovered by experience during the…

“There is an important role for government in preventing fraud and the use of force. This is why we need a strong military to protect us from foreign tyrants, an effective police force to protect us from villains, and a…

The incompetence displayed in the Obamacare rollout may certainly make the supporters squirm, and the opposers cheer with heart felt “We told you so”. But focusing on this fiasco is energy misplaced. Obamacare so intensely flawed on so many levels…

From Jeff Jacoby at the Boston Globe, Would Democrats embrace a JFK today? Excerpts: When his re-election in 1958 made it clear that Kennedy would be running for the Democratic presidential nomination, Eleanor Roosevelt was asked in a TV interview…

“The charade that is fundamental to the political game—pretending that politicians have wealth that they can give away to favored constituencies rather than wealth that they can expropriate from one group of people for the enjoyment of others—does not work…

When you play the game of Monopoly you understand the rules. With a few hundred dollars of monopoly money you understand that you can buy tiny little plastic houses and hotels and collect more colored pieces of paper money for…

Daniel Greenfield writes in his excellent blog, Sultan Knish, No Business Like Government Business. Excerpts: More money doesn’t mean better or even workable government. It means the corporations and unions who are on the inside will take more money home and…

Daniel Greenfield writes in his excellent blog, Sultan Knish, No Business Like Government Business. Excerpts: The corporation’s goal is to turn its shareholders into consumers; transforming free people into people who want free things so that the corporation of government…

Dilbert’s Scott Adam writes in the Wall Street Journal, Scott Adams’ Secret of Success: Failure Excerpts: Here’s the counterargument: When I was a commercial loan officer for a large bank, my boss taught us that you should never make a…

“Crony capitalism feeds on campaign finance laws that give union and corporate political action committees the power of unlimited spending while individual citizens are restricted to $2,500 per campaign. The famous “occupiers” of Wall Street actually got this right. Corporations…

“The “common good” (or the “public interest”) is an indefinable concept. There is no such thing as the public. The public is only a number of individual people. When the common good of a society is regarded as something apart…